Groups Vie to Sway Senate Confirmation
By Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 8, 2006
Three days before Thanksgiving, a trio of former law clerks to Samuel A. Alito Jr. did a "fly-in" to Portland, Maine, to tout the Supreme Court nominee in a strategy organized by the conservative group Progress for America. Two weeks later, a minivan filled with Mainers who oppose Alito traveled the coast from Bar Harbor to Kittery, gathering petition signatures as part of a "Rolling Justice Tour" coordinated by a coalition of left-leaning national groups.
Maine's newspapers have carried dozens of letters to the editor about the nomination, the result of choreographed media campaigns. And this weekend, the last before Alito's Senate confirmation hearing begins tomorrow, the state's television stations are airing ads paid for by Washington-based organizations that portray Alito as a "man of honor, integrity, principle" -- or, alternately, as part of a dangerous right-wing takeover of the Supreme Court.
With two moderate Republican senators who support abortion rights -- senators whose views of this nominee, in other words, are especially uncertain -- Maine is one of several states that the dueling forces in the debate over Alito have targeted for what Brookings Institution scholar Thomas E. Mann calls an artificial grass-roots -- or "Astroturf" -- campaign.
On both sides, organizations based in the nation's capital are pouring money, manpower and advocacy expertise into these states, trying to stir up authentic passions among constituents who might influence Senate votes.
"We don't fire the guns. We are just positioning them," said Chris Myers, executive director of Progress for America, which is spending $100,000 for several days of ads in Maine as well as in Louisiana and North Dakota, two other swing states. As part of the indirect strategy of mobilizing local opinion leaders, the group has enlisted in Maine a popular radio talk show host, a longtime local lawyer and the campaign treasurer of the senior senator, Olympia J. Snowe (R).
Local groups for or against Alito have been created in many states. In addition to Maine, much of the advocacy is being aimed at moderate Republicans including Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (Pa.) and Lincoln D. Chafee (R.I.), as well as Democrats from relatively conservative states, including Mary Landrieu (La.), Ken Salazar (Colo.), Bill Nelson (Fla.), Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor of Arkansas, and Kent Conrad and Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota.
Whether the funds and energy national organizations are investing in the Alito debate will prove effective is unclear. Traditionally, public attention on Supreme Court nominations crests once a confirmation hearing begins.
On the eve of Alito's hearing, the intense advocacy efforts in Maine so far are not "having much impact at all," according to Steve Abbott, chief of staff to Sen. Susan Collins (R). "I don't hear the chatter, when I go out to eat, when I go to the gym," said Abbott, who lives in Portland and commutes to work on Capitol Hill. As television ads have proliferated in the days before Alito's hearing, Collins has been out of earshot on a trip to Antarctica.
In part, the campaigns for and against Alito are getting muffled because Maine, like other swing states in inexpensive media markets, is saturated with advocacy. "One week, it's ANWR [Alaskan oil-drilling] up here, the next week it's prescription drugs. Everything that comes up, the groups take to the airways in Maine," Abbott said. "We've reached the point it's just turned to clutter."
This winter, the future of the Supreme Court is a back-seat issue in Maine, according to several state politics-watchers who say residents are more focused on the immediate problems of high fuel oil prices and possible electricity shortages.
"The reality is, there are people who are on the far sides of the debate who are using this nomination as a battle over a whole host of issues and a lot of sort of tangential issues," said Richard A. Bennett, a former state Senate president who is treasurer of Snowe's reelection campaign this year and has been speaking out on Alito's behalf. "I really doubt that most ordinary citizens in Maine -- certainly the ones I've spoken to -- I really doubt they are being really attentive right now."
Senators, meanwhile, bristle at the suggestion that their vote can be influenced by Washington-directed issue campaigns. "As far as I am concerned, they are wasting their money," Conrad said.
Snowe and Collins pride themselves on being heirs to a long independent streak in their state's politics, unswayable by interest groups, said Christian P. Potholm, a professor of government at Bowdoin College. "For the two Maine senators, both sides would be better off if they just took the money and threw it into the Potomac River," Potholm said. "The advocacy groups don't care, but it's likely to be counterproductive."
Leaders of the most visible such groups dispute the sentiment that their efforts may prove ineffective.
Starting with the failed nomination of Robert H. Bork in 1987, interest groups have applied campaign-style techniques to Supreme Court confirmations, and both sides had been waiting more than a decade to release their pent-up forces. No vacancy on the court had materialized for 11 years until last summer's nomination of John G. Roberts Jr., now the chief justice.
"This is a splendid example of shoe-leather democracy," said Ralph G. Neas, president of the liberal group People for the American Way, who has worked on every Supreme Court confirmation debate for three decades.
Neas said a coalition of about 70 groups opposing Alito has accomplished important steps in the pre-hearing phase. He said the coalition has defined the issues in the nomination, encouraged senators to remain undecided until the hearing, and raised money -- in addition to mobilizing its base.
In Maine, the scores of people who signed anti-Alito petitions along the route of the Rolling Justice tour included many who knew of the project because they already were on e-mail lists of MoveOn.org.
"I travel in a very politically engaged circle of people, and I think that people are very concerned" about his nomination, said Susan Dorr, a real estate broker who is a former state legislator and town selectman in Camden. She said she was one of about a dozen people who turned out when the tour passed through there.
Mike Duddy, a Portland lawyer and co-chairman of Mainers for Judge Alito, said that he offered to work with national groups, believing, "if there is not some presence on the ground to keep a level-headed voice, the opponents would completely occupy what would otherwise be a vacuum."
So far, he has been taking reporters' calls or appearing on talk radio perhaps once a week, but he has not attended any large pro-Alito events. "From my point of view . . . the level of interest seems to be muted," Duddy said. "I don't think it's completely ignored. Neither do I think it's the first thing people are thinking about."
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